Sometimes stories are so painful that you can’t write about them.
But sometimes you have to.
I know that the readership of this site tends to just be foreign nationals trying to break in, which of course would get them nowhere, but occasionally real humans visit and anyone doing so would justifyably get the impression that this site is dead. And it was dead, from November of 2023 until today.
Why did I go silent, and why have I returned? If you really want to know why I went silent for thirteen months, read on. If not, I won’t be offended. I needed to write this for myself, but you are not required to read it. This was started in August, but most if it was written in one sitting this evening.
Giving yourself goals beyond your physical ability
In the fall of 2023 I planned for an event. It was a big one for me, and I knew it. But I prepared myself in advance, both physically through lots of rest, and by lining up all the pieces and players through many telephone calls, email messages and texts.
The event was the 2023 South Carolina Libertarian Party’s state convention, and my plan was to interview the candidates seeking their party’s nomination for President.
Having left the Libertarian Party three years earlier, I hoped that I would be able to conduct fair and unbiased interviews, giving the readers of Independent Political Report some insight into who was running.
Everything went quite well on the day of the event. All six of the (later seven) candidates who appeared went out of their way to give me time for proper interviews. At the end of the day I had roughly 3 1/2 hours of audio.
It was a very long day, and I even attended the debate. I wasn’t planning on attending the dinner, but I did, through the generosity of a friend who’s wife had decided not to attend.
My overall impression of the convention was that it ran very well up until the end of the debate, when a serious error in judgement was made by permitting a local sociopath to speak. He has been claiming to be running for president for years but is only slightly more qualified than a dead rat. I recall him wearing a hoodie and mumbling a lot.
I had to deal with this person many times over the years, and in the past the state party had always instituted minimal rules for attending debates to keep him away. This person can’t meet any minimum requirements. You are probably wondering why this person is even mentioned here, but it is a factor in what transpired. Could I ignore it, or would I have to mention his presence?
At the end of the evening, I was exhausted. I made it home by Uber, but I think that if I had been there another hour they would have been calling an ambulance.
But I had my interviews done. Or did I?
Pieces of a puzzle
I started writing the next day. I outlined what I was going to do, and the order the interviews would be published in. Then I started building the six interviews, reviewing the recordings to make sure I had the same questions to cover.
Hours went by.
I still had to work, so by the third day, I needed to deal with customers. I quickly found myself in the very bad cycle of working and then trying to write at night. Within another few days I was exhausted and had to stop.
Having a heart attack affects everyone differently. In my case, even though it had now been a year and a half, I found that I was no longer able to go into “crunch mode” to get something this big done.
Then the writer’s block set in. I found that while I can write commentary and give opinions and analysis, I am horrible at trying to put together interviews without interjecting opinions. And I had a lot of opinions about these candidates!
Then the anger set in. Why was my former party putting up such a weak slate of candidates? What could I write about this set of six without giving my opinion of who would win? I felt it would be Oliver and that it would be a horrible battle at convention and end up fracturing the party.
And how could I say anything without being brutally honest about just how much of a fool several of these candidates were and expose the few who were clearly con-artists? What was their motivation and what were they trying to achieve?
Of course I can write this after the fact and it doesn’t really matter whether I was right or wrong. What actually happened was far worse than I guessed last November. But back to the puzzle.
Another week went by. I found I could not even look at several draft commentaries I had been working on. Now I understood the puzzle. It wasn’t the articles I was writing. It was the puzzle of how you keep yourself neutral when you are used to giving opinions.
The articles sat unfinished.
A step into the dark
So I went silent. I spent a lot of time talking to a friend about my writer’s block. He eventually talked me into going to a local meeting of the writer’s association. His intent was good, but I never should have gone.
So the last Sunday in February, after voting the day before in the Republican Presidential Preference Primary for the first time since 2000, I attended the meeting at the downtown public library.
I am sure it was useful to many of the writers present, but I found it quite boring. It was obvious that this well meaning group was not necessarily my solution.
Neither was the set of stairs which I fell down outside the library, fracturing my hip on the concrete sidewalk and placing me in the hospital after a very slow and painful half mile ambulance trip. I now understood the meaning of level 10 pain.
I survived the surgery and went home five days later with a slight cough and a walker. I was back in the hospital with covid and pneumonia a few days later.
It took months to figure out how to walk again, compounded by the fact that my glasses shattered when I hit the pavement. So nearly blind, unable to walk, and still dealing with the heart issues, I carried on. But without writing. At least not writing political comentary. I was still writing programs, maintaining servers and supporting my clients.
Eventually I went to the eye doctor to try to get new glasses. And here comes the trifecta! Cataracts. I needed eye surgery before they could correct my vision.
More time went by, and I had the first operation on my right eye in June. You are supposed to see instantly after this is done, but they put in a 10.5 corrective lens. Being sixty-six and having been near sighted since I was five, I didn’t see anything but gray shadows in my right eye for more than a month. It took nearly two months before I could even try to focus my right eye.
At this point I am still trying to decide if I should risk the other eye or just go slowly blind. My right eye is useless. I still can’t even see my phone to make a call or request an Uber if my left eye is closed. What if it takes four weeks to see out of it? I will not survive that long by myself.
Don’t they usually shoot horses before it gets this bad?
Getting back in the saddle
During the summer I discovered a very unusual but effective method of therapy.
I got back into printing. Not with paper, but with plastic.
A project for one of my customers involved building them a 3D printer lab and teaching them how to use and manage printers — as well as design things.
I hadn’t used any of my printers since the Covid lock-down, so while building their lab I decided it would be best to get one of the same model for my apartment.
So while working — which I normally do from home — I started printing things.
Printing involves preparing the printer, sending your part to it, then taking the part off and preparing the printer when the part is finished. I found that this was “forcing” me to get up from my desk every hour or two to take care of the printer.
Just that extra dozen times going back and forth from my living room to the back bedroom every day found me walking faster and steadier. Within a few weeks I was no longer using the cane inside my apartment! According to my iPhone, my walking asymetry was down from 35-40% to under 10% some days!
A new goal
I wrote a number of commentaries in 2023 regarding the need for a new political party. I had tentatively started organizing one, but now found that group had merged with another and a ten state national party now existed! This made it imperitive that someone organize South Carolina. I needed to get off the bench and back in the game.
So I started the process. It isn’t finished yet — by far — but it will be organized. My goal is to start it on the way, leaving the management of the new party in this state to others more physically able to do the work. But I can advise and I can help lay the keel.
I decided to attend the December 2024 convention of this new party. I even bought my “ticket” to attend the event back in September and was walking several thousand steps a day several times a week. I was ready.
But what do they call it after the trifecta? Another fall, then another bout of covid. October was a nightmare. I was able to work from my desk, but I didn’t leave my apartment for weeks.
I found myself reading and commenting more on the few political sites I visit regularly. Unfortunately, after the small fall and covid my walking asymetry is back up in a range highly undesirable, and I have energy levels barely back to what I had in the late spring. I can visit customers, but now I find it even more difficult to carry things with me than I did in the early summer. I could never carry a suitcase through an airport or handle staying in a hotel for several days.
So the convention trip is a wash. I’ve had my Apollo 13. But I have made it back to earth and there will be another mission. Just not this December.
And I proved to myself this evening that I can write again.
